Our edited volume Real Life in Real Time: Live Streaming Culture is officially out now from MIT Press! It’s co-edited by Johanna Brewer, Amanda Cullen, Christopher Persaud, and myself. It has 20 chapters by a wonderful array of authors from across disciplines, and a foreword by the one and only T. L. Taylor. Plus the whole book is available to read for free online through MIT Press’s open access program. You can read about the book here and you read the book itself here.
I’m so proud of our editorial team and all of our authors. This book represents the first edited volume dedicated to cultural issues in live streaming, and I love that it both addresses games and pushes past the assumption that live streaming is all about video games. The idea for the project came in the first months of the pandemic, when 2020 conferences were being cancelled. So many scholars who were just embarking on their live streaming research lost their venue for sharing the work, and we wanted to create a home for these important conversations.
I had the pleasure of co-authoring the intro to the book, “The Revolution Is Streaming Live: Cultural Perspectives on the Age of Live Streaming,” and authoring a solo chapter, “How Camming Made Streaming: Retelling the History of Live Streaming through Webcam Modeling.” My chapter is a historical argument about how sex workers have been integral to the rise of live streaming, even though they have largely been written out of its history.
Congrats to all of the authors! Faculty or grad students interested in teaching the book, please feel free to get in touch if you’d like Johanna or I do Zoom in for a guest class visit.
